"Mine?" he asked, the visible corner of his mouth curling into a wrinkled smile. "My demons," he mused. "I have spurned them all, and held my demons close; lest I fall, and they lose their host." He turned and faced me. "That one is mine," he said with a wink.

"Do you still feel that way?"

"What way?"

"That you must spurn them," I said, pointing across the sea as though the rest of the world lay in wait beyond it.

He nodded slowly for several seconds. "Evan, ours is an inherently lonely existence, because of what we are."

"And what's that?" I asked quickly.

He turned toward me as though surprised at my question. "Why do you ask that question of me when you already possess the answer? We are the singers of goat songs. We are Zeus' Dioscuri sons," he said, his voice rising with emotion.

I narrowed my eyes at him, confused.

He shook his head impatiently. "We are their victims, their hostages," he said, pointing beyond the sea as I had done. He faced straight ahead and took a deep breath to collect himself. "It is all so different now Evan, at times it is difficult to know where one stands in the larger picture. Yes, quite difficult.

"The Greeks and Egyptians of my youth believed in the transmigration of the soul, they believed in us, or at least the possibility of us. But those days are gone, the tragedy is that their beliefs, which served us so well, failed them so miserably. The problem was the standards of those beliefs were too low, too tangible. You see, if the goals are not high enough then the common man can stand on tipped toes and touch the top of the portico, dwarfing all gods within. At that point, the system becomes valueless and without hope. In the end, those men who, through courage, had stood as tall as their own gods eventually showed cowardice and slinked away from the mirror, not in fear, but in loathing, for the once lofty gods now showed the same tangible flaws as their aspiring worshipers.

"It is a stroke of ever amusing genius that they are able, quite ignorantly, to reinvent themselves in the image of their invented gods. If you read the hierology of any religion you find the same contrived virgin mother of invention at its core.

"Common men decry that their world, having strayed from the path of righteousness, brought about the necessity for a prophet to arise. He comes to save the common man and right the listing ship of his jilted hopes. This prophet is followed for a while until he becomes familiar to his followers and is thus sapped of his revolutionary zeal. The common men, disillusioned, revert back to their own paths, which inevitably leads to yet another virgin of invention, pregnant with prophet and hope.